Trust in media corporations died a long time ago, AI has just accelerated the trend. When human ‘journalists’ write to a script handed to them by the media’s editors and owners (eg ‘write articles that convince our readers to maintain their confidence in the <dot-com, subprime, AI> market’ or ‘write articles that convince our readers that <regime change, tariffs> is needed’), and the result is a debacle, then trust is eroded and questions arise about the journalist’s integrity and/or intelligence. Then the owners and editors find new fresh journalists to generate new stories to ‘restore trust’.

With AI, the editors and owners can just send their scripts to a machine and it’ll write the narrative as requested - but without a human face on that article. However, most readers would not accept such material as trustworthy.

There is another reason that AI reduces trust in media, which is that AI now makes it trivial to trace media ownership up the tree to the consequential owners, look at their other economic interests, and examine if the articles they print tend to favor those economic interests. Applying this analytical framework to the Atlantic itself is an interesting exercise.

Q1: Would it be entirely unfair to characterize the Atlantic as ‘yet another mouthpiece of the neoliberal project instantiated in the United States in the 1970s’?